Overloaded. Overworked. Overwhelmed. Australians are paying the price of keeping up with the demands of modern life.
Just recently, ADP Research released their annual People at Work report, and it’s opened a portal into the mental state of working Australians. Findings from the study show that 53% of Australian employees are experiencing elevated stress levels, with 23% expressing they feel overloaded.¹ To put this into perspective, rates of self-reported overload in Japan, Singapore, India, and China come in at 19%, 15%, 11%, and 10% respectively. That makes Australia’s workers the most stressed in the entire Asia-Pacific region.
The state of play for business owners tells a story just as harrowing, with ABS data showing one-third of business owners experience moderate or higher levels of psychological distress.²
Those headline numbers mirror what we hear across the table every week. As wealth advisers, we spend a lot of time with both financially successful employees and business owners. Through our time spent learning about their lives and their worlds, we’ve recognised the pronounced correlation between busyness and stress.
Every single one of our working clients leads an incredibly busy life, and the weight of responsibility is heavy on their shoulders and their minds. Between juggling the demands of family, work, health, and finance, it can feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to cover all bases.
The toll such a lifestyle has on their time and energy comes to light especially in the moments when a specific financial project comes up. Take an estate planning project, for example. That can require collaboration between us, as their financial advisers; their solicitor; their accountant; and potentially a handful of other professionals too. Or a property purchase, which can require involvement from ourselves, along with a lender, a real estate broker, a solicitor, an insurance provider, and so on.
Looking up at the mountainous task ahead, we’d often hear our clients say things like:
We’d reply, “We can do it.” And really, that’s how our financial concierge service came to life.
Because we already hold the full picture of each client’s finances, we can gather documents, brief professionals, track deadlines, and pay invoices while our clients carry on with life. One month we’re acting as the financial manager of a building renovation project, the next we’re stepping in to assist with asking the right questions of the general insurer. Some requests are routine, others wonderfully idiosyncratic.
Regardless of the specific task at hand, our clients can rest assured knowing that in our team’s capable hands, it will be dealt with. In this way, our concierge service interrupts the preconceived notion that taking things off your plate also means taking your foot off the pedal; that resisting the urge to add to your already sky high list of responsibilities will come at the cost of progress. It also ensures that you turn your intention into an achievement.
We encounter this thought pattern near-daily:
A successful individual has stacked their plate high, and they’re starting to feel the strain. They’ve had a property project on their radar for some time now, but they’re hyper-aware that taking on this project will require a lot from them—especially considering it involves coordinating a handful of individual advisers from different fields of expertise. It’s a double-edged sword: Take it on, and be even more stretched thin than you already are, or leave it on ice, knowing that your inaction could seriously stall your wealth accumulation.
At a crossroads, our financial concierge brings a third option to the table—an avenue to pursue your plans without having to give time and energy you don’t have. A bit like having your cake and eating it too.
Taking care of our clients’ financial matters in this way for so long, we’ve built up a strong panel of skilled professionals from a wide range of industries: solicitors, buyers’ agents, general insurance brokers, real estate agents, mortgage brokers, bankers, the list goes on. Over time, the network of connections we’ve grown from providing this level of service to our clients has become an important part of the service itself. We’re able to draw on this bench whenever a project calls for specialist input, slotting the right people into place quickly and keeping everyone on the same page from day one.
To many, this sounds akin to a traditional family office. Classic family office models are typically built for ultra high net-worth households with dedicated in-house staff and significant fixed infrastructure. Our financial concierge offers comparable coordination and oversight, tailored for clients who value that depth of service but prefer a more flexible structure without the formality or overhead of a traditional family office.
What this means in real terms is peace of mind. Projects move forward and deadlines are met, but the day-to-day coordination happens in the background. With more headspace, our financial concierge clients are able to invest their energy where it has the greatest impact.
Let us do what we do best, so you can focus on what you do best. Get in touch with Ulton's Wealth Management team today and let us help you move forward — without the overwhelm.
Sources
¹ ADP Research, 2025.
² Australian Small Business & Family Ombudsman, 2025.